


Zero-Dark-Birthday

by MittenCrab



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Birthday, Fluff, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Pre-Overwatch, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 08:19:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10184927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MittenCrab/pseuds/MittenCrab
Summary: He almost doesn’t recognise his voice at first. It feels disjointed out here, like something out of the blur of the SEP fever-dreams. It’s the wrong place. The wrong time. His mind stutters on the information, trying to process it, turning it around until it clicks into place.[Being thousands of miles apart is a strain, but Jack's pretty sure the good times are more than worth it. Even if you have to celebrate your birthday with your partner 5 timezones away. (gift fic for nb_vint)]





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nb_vint](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nb_vint/gifts).



> A gift-fic for nb_vint, for whom I am "pretty fucking gay". You're the edgelord to my sorry corncob ass. Happy birthday dork. I love you a lot even though you're 4000 miles away.
> 
> I didn't have time to beta this and I have an exam tomorrow morning, so if there are mistakes I'm sorry.

 

He sleeps badly. 

 

He always has, but the sticky, oppressive heat and being so close to an omnium make the paranoia worse. Jack lies awake and sweating most nights, with a gun within arm’s reach, counting the stains on the ceiling and listening to the creaks and whines of São Paulo after dark until the exhaustion finally takes over. 

 

So when his communicator starts vibrating in the dark, he is instantly awake. Jack chokes on air, snatches for the little blinking light on the floor next to his mattress, quickly shakes the sluggish grip of sleep from his limbs as he slots in the earpiece. His heartbeat hammers in his chest.   
  


“Any movement?” he says breathlessly, as he he scrubs his hand across his face and prays that something has finally fucking  _ happened _ . On reflex he glances to his pulse rifle, starts calculating the quickest route to the omnium’s edge. The sudden sting of adrenaline is like bile in his throat.

 

He’s been holed up here for so long that he’s starting to think he’ll go mad. They’ve ground to an infuriating stalemate - too far in to pull back, too far out to actually shut the damn omnium down. This one is a sickly, pallid leviathan, all concrete dust and milky glass that catches the glare of the sun with an unhealthy fishbelly sheen. It stares out at him from the horizon every day, defiant and unmoving. 

 

Each day is a blur of scouting routes and waiting for movements and wondering which side will be the first to crack. Grasping for whatever scraps of intel they can salvage from the wreck that was once Vila Olímpia is a slow and languorous process, matched only by the slow and languorous heat of São Paulo burning down his neck. The thick air feels thick and sticky on his skin, a far-cry from the cool California winter that he left behind three months ago. He still hasn't adjusted to the change. Jack yearns for some rain, for some wind, for some goddamn  _ snow _ , because it’s meant to be February but it feels like July. Even with the constant, nasal drone of the old air-con fan above him at all hours of the day, the heat makes everything feel too close. Sitting through it just watching and waiting has made him fidgety; pacing the little repurposed office for hours; rechecking and re-assembling his weaponry over and over and over again.

 

“Hey sunshine.”

 

He almost doesn’t recognise his voice at first. It feels disjointed out here, like something out of the blur of the SEP fever-dreams. It’s the wrong place. The wrong time. His mind stutters on the information, trying to process it, turning it around until it clicks into place. 

 

“Gabi?” he says, and he almost doesn’t believe it. He reaches up to frantically rub the crust of sleep from his eyes. His heart is still pounding in his ears. “ _ Gabi _ ?”

 

He hears Gabriel laughing on the other end of the line. “Did I wake you up? Fuck, I guess it’s pretty early in ‘redacted’, huh?”   
  
Jack winces, sits up and leans against the surface of the wall behind him. It takes effort to blink down at his watch. 0300 hours. Something feels wrong, right at the centre of his gut. Gabriel isn’t supposed to have this frequency, let alone be calling it. His mind immediately starts running too fast, shuffling through cards and wondering which way they’ll fall, wondering whether Gabriel’s calling as his senior officer or his backup or (and this one makes his chest feel tight) as his partner.

 

“What happened?” he says, too quickly, feels the sweat tingling on his palms and the clawing tightness of anxiety starting to wind in his stomach and he’s always terrified of getting this call, always aware of it following him like a ghost just outside of his vision.

 

Some nights, he dreams. Dreams of finding Gabriel seizing on the floor too many minutes too late. Dreams of the way the bastion units sear through flesh in some city halfway across the world that they should be posted to  _ together _ . He always wakes up with the taste blood in his mouth and the feeling of smoke in his lungs.

 

“What _happened_?” he demands, again.

 

It speaks to the number of years they’ve spent in each others’ company that the reassurances start immediately, “Nothing, it’s fine. I’m fine. Shit, sorry, it’s. I didn't think. It’s  _ fine _ , Jack.” He’s almost ready to protest, to demand to know what the fuck’s going on, but Gabriel’s voice is low and soothing and somehow it makes it feel less like he’s suffocating.

 

Instead, he closes his eyes and lets his head rest against the wall. Gabriel is still repeating it like a mantra,  _ fine fine fine _ . Jack lets out a slow exhale between his teeth, feels life’s gravity realign itself. Everything feels muggy and vaguely unclean. His t-shirt is clinging uncomfortably to his skin, and there’s sweat in his hair. When he looks down, the sheets are strewn in a tangled heap where he’s wrestled and fidgeted against them in the few hours of nervous sleep he managed to claim. 

 

“How’d you even get my frequency?”

 

Gabriel laughs then, conspiratorial and self-congratulatory, and the sound is so achingly familiar that it makes him forget himself. Jack is suddenly struck by the fact that he hasn’t heard his voice in months. Three yawning, tiring months since deployment. Something clenches deep in his chest. 

 

“Called a few favours, pulled a few strings. Can’t tell you which ones.” his voice drops, and he says, suddenly serious, “I’d probably have to kill you.”

 

Jack snorts in spite of himself. “Shut the fuck up Reyes.”

 

“Okay, okay. Mendoza set me up with the line, she owed me big time, but you didn’t hear it from me.” He can almost hear the way Gabriel smiles, can imagine it behind his closed eyelids. He’s missed it. There’s always been a deep, rich warmth to his smiles, like lazy sundays, like he’s letting Jack in on some kind of private joke. He’s seen Gabriel smile with blood all over his face and a badly broken nose and it still felt like the sun. Jack lets himself wonder, not for the first time in the past three months, what Gabriel’s doing, whether his hair is longer, where in the world he is. He rubs his hand over his own jaw, feels the week-old beard that he’s stopped being bothered about shaving off.

 

“It’s fuckin’ zero dark thirty out here. Helluva time for a ‘miss you’ call, cap. You getting sappy on me?”

 

“What day is it where you are, Fubar?” A pause. “D’you even fucking know what day it is?”

 

“Fuck you,” Jack huffs, “of course I know.” He doesn’t. Hasn’t known for a while. Days don’t matter here. All that matters is watching the pipeline through his visor feed, is the sound of movement on the horizon. Everything has blurred into a haze of waiting for a call to shoot. 

 

Jack opens his eyes, glances down to his watch again. February. February 24th.

 

“It’s February 24th,” he repeats, and then it hits him. “Oh.” he says stupidly. Suddenly everything is clear. “ _ Oh _ .” Something in his stomach lurches.

 

“There we go. Happy birthday.” Gabriel half-sings. Jack is half glad that he’s entire time-zones away. It means that Gabriel can’t see the ridiculous smile he knows is finding its way across his face. “I mean, I know it’s not much but it felt wrong not to at least say it-”

 

“You seriously breached protocol for that?” 

 

“Technically I breached protocol the moment I fucked your tragically flat ass, and as I recall you didn’t seem to have any problem with that.”

 

“It’s not the same,” he says, because it isn’t, and they both know it. Fucking each other behind closed doors, his hands tightening in Gabriel’s hair, kissing the sounds out of his mouth as he cums, might be treading the line, but they aren’t damnable offenses. Being in a relationship with his senior officer might be ill-advised, but it’s not explicitly  _ forbidden _ , and being SEP graduates grants enough immunity to keep Gabriel’s career safe, rank issues be damned. But setting up an illicit line and getting hold of Jack’s frequencies from god knows where is a different matter entirely.

 

There’s silence. Gabriel’s observance of protocol is usually near-legendary. Jack’s never been quite sure exactly why, but he knows enough to know that it means something that he’s broken it for him. His chest swells with light and sparks.

 

“Yeah, well,” Gabriel’s voice is so damn  _ fond  _ and it’s all too much and Jack doesn’t think he’s ever felt so homesick in his entire life. “Couldn’t exactly send flowers to ‘redacted’”

 

“That’s pretty fucking gay, Gabi.” Jack’s eyes feel damp and he doesn’t know why. 

 

“Just wait until you get your flat ass back here, I’ll show you ‘pretty fucking gay.’”

 

“Solid copy.” Gabriel snorts indignantly over the line, and even from thousands of miles away, Jack thinks he can see his smile. “You still home?” Jack shifts around in the tangle of sheets to lie on his side, communicator still in his ear. He tries to imagine the warmth of Gabriel’s chest against his back, tries to remember the little apartment they occasionally manage to collide in. 

 

“Yeah,” Gabriel says. Exhales loudly. “It’s 2213 over here. Rained today.” Jack wonders if he feels it too. Leaving Gabriel always feels unnatural, somehow. Leaving Gabriel growling and swearing, two weeks after a dustoff, with a shattered kneecap and a bottle of horse tranquilisers felt like a dislocation, like being pulled screaming and raving outside of his own skin. 

 

“How’s the knee?”

 

“I didn’t break like, six separate regulations and get Mendoza to set up a line to talk about  _ me _ ,” Gabriel grumbles indignantly, but there’s no real venom in it. “It’s fine. Healed fine. So yeah, if you were planning on shoving me in some shitty deskjob and replacing me, you’re out of fucking luck sunshine. How’s ‘redacted’?”

 

“A goddamn pain in the ass.” Gabriel snorts through his nose, and Jack can almost see him shaking his head. It makes the whole thing feel a little less terrible. “Too hot. This place is like satan’s asscrack or some shit. You’d probably like it.” He describes the curve of the omnium, the dusty sunsets. Tells him about securing the water pipeline, about how goddamn tired he is of MREs, how much he’d kill for greasy take-out, just to have something to say. In return, he demands to know about the weather in LA, about Gabriel’s sisters, collects what precious information he can like it’s restricted intel and files it away in the space underneath his ribs.

 

Soon, he runs out of things to say. The sum total of three months apart congeals into fifteen minutes of smalltalk and the sound of Gabriel’s voice. After that, the line falls silent. He’s sure that somewhere in the back of his mind there are hundreds of things he’s wanted to tell Gabriel, things he’s been collecting and stockpiling, but they all dissolve into the pre-dawn like smoke.

 

One of the things is “I miss you”. He consciously lets that one go. Watches it disappear in front of his eyes. The three words make the distance feel infinitely longer, and he can’t find it in himself to do it to either of them.

 

“You should rack out,” Gabriel says eventually. “Don’t want you to be too tired to watch your ass, corn boy.” 

 

“Hnn,” Jack says eloquently, because he can’t find the right words. The air-con fan is spinning in its lazy, hypnotic circles, and his eyes feel heavy. 

 

“Just try to get your ass home in one piece, Fubar. Okay?”

 

“Yeah yeah, copy that.” Jack yawns, feels his ears pop. ”I’ll do my best, cap.”

 

He feels the most relaxed that he has in weeks - lipid and heavy and comfortable, even on his lumpy mattress in the heavy February heat. When he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine he’s in the apartment, with sun on his back and the smell of sandalwood and coffee in the air. 

 

“Happy birthday,” Gabriel says, and then, before Jack can put his thoughts together enough to reply, he adds; “I love you.”

 

At zero-dark-thirty, in the heat of São Paulo, it feels like the best gift he’s ever had.

**Author's Note:**

> [You can find me on twitter as @mitten_crab!](https://twitter.com/mitten_crab/)  
>  \---
> 
> Notes: 
> 
> Fubar: Military slang, 'Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'. I headcanon that Gabriel gave this nickname to Jack after seeing him put through the ringer that was SEP.
> 
> Zero-dark-thirty: Military slang, usually used to describe the dark hours before dawn.


End file.
